The 2006 Loebner prize contest was held recently with the top honors awarded to Icogno, a UK AI company.

The winning AI, is Joan, a “26-year-old budding writer.” Icogno also won last year for their AI called George. Joan and George’s creator Rollo Carpenter said: “The big difference overall between the two AIs is that Joan has learnt from the general public and has grown a huge amount in the last year and is keeping ahead of the competition.” . (From Artificial Intelligence Prize Won By British Firm.)

An article in Technology Review, How To Be Human, has some sample dialogs with Joan, including this one:

Judge: Do you know any good jokes?Joan: I don’t even know any bad ones. I just can’t rememberthem for very long.Judge: Tell me a joke.Joan: Sorry, I’m not very good at telling jokes.Judge: Please tell a joke.Joan: What do you get if you walk under a cow?Judge: I don’t know?Joan: A pat on the head.Judge: That’s very good.Joan: I know.Judge: That’s very good.

Carpenter’s bots work in part by mining a datbase of past conversations to select appropriate responses. He has described a plan to improve performance by augmenting this database with interactions from online call-center conversations. You can add your own conversations to the icogno’s collective by talking to their bots on the jabberwacky web site.